In Traffic I talk a bit about the curiously positive feeling you can get when you are “let in” by a driver with a friendly wave — perhaps, as some have suggested, triggering some inherent impulse towards reciprocal altruism, even though we’ll never see that driver again. Conversely, if that same driver rudely cuts in front of you with nary a glance, you might have a desire to punish them in some way, as if they would somehow learn not to mess with you the next time (even if there won’t be a next time). One question is: Were these feelings of positivity and negativity essentially equal, even if the value of the “transaction” (i.e., the right of way) was the same?

A new study by Boaz Keysar and colleagues at the University of Chicago, titled “Reciprocity is Not Give and Take: Asymmetric Reciprocity to Positive and Negative Acts,” (pdf here) published in the December issue of Psychological Science, based on a number of trials of experimental “giving” and “taking” games in the lab and on the street, suggests that we are much more willing to “escalate” our response in the face of “negative reciprocity” (e.g., when we’re cut off) than we’re willing to reward someone in the face of positive reciprocity. Indeed, our perception of the exchange is skewed by this dynamic. “Because giving appears to be inherently more generous than taking, an objectively more selfish giver can sometimes be seen as more generous than an objectively selfless taker.” The authors conclude by suggesting a new mantra: “You scratch my back, and I will scratch yours, but if you take my eye, I will take both of yours.”

In a University of Chicago release, Keysar made an explicit parallel to traffic:

“For instance in driving, if you are kind and let someone go in front of you, that driver may be considerate in response. But if you cut someone off, that person may react very aggressively, and this could escalate to road rage.” (of course, one problem is that it’s objectively more difficult to reward someone in traffic — you can drive courteously or safely, but that’s what you’re supposed to already be doing — than it is to find ways to harass them).

Things get worse when the offender doesn’t realize how much their offense is being felt by their victim. “The one receiving the slight cannot imagine that the slighter lacks that appreciation. And so it goes, because of such differential perception, they respond more and more strongly. Small slights could escalate to unbelievable, irrational feuds.”

“The auto industry must acknowledge that a rational transportation policy should seek a balance between individual convenience, the efficient use of limited resources, and urban-living values that protect spaciousness, natural beauty, and human-scale mobility. Twice as many autos and freeways as we now have would be a sentence of death for our cities. A necessary shift in public policy toward effective mass transit systems (which consume relatively little energy per passenger mile) would ameliorate the problem, but Detroit still must recognize that the time has come to begin developing external combustion engines (like the steam engine), to build sturdy engines of smaller horsepower that will travel twice as far on a gallon of gas as do today’s engines.”

A fragment lifted from some transpo-wonk’s position paper vis a vis the auto bailout? Nope. It’s an article by Stewart Udall, writing in The Atlantic in 1972 (thanks to Kottke for the tip).

Of course, we didn’t exactly see the “end of the love affair with the automobile” that Udall refers to — as historian Brian Ladd chronicles in Autophobia, that’s a rather cyclical conceit — and the cars Detroit went on to build (and we happily bought, or were encouraged by federal policy to buy) became less efficient. And as the always insightful Dan Neil notes here, in a review of the new Ford Fusion (52 MPG!), better fuel economy out of Detroit was never a technological hurdle as much a matter of overcoming its own lassitude, enabled by government and the mass of consumers who, let’s be honest, never had much altruistic interest in better fuel economy except when they began to take the hit.

In any case, Udall’s article is an interesting reminder of roads not taken.

How We Drive is the companion blog to Tom Vanderbilt’s New York Times bestselling book, Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us), published by Alfred A. Knopf in the U.S. and Canada, Penguin in the U.K, and in languages other than English by a number of other fine publishers worldwide.